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Saturday, December 05, 2009

Walt Disney flies again

So over at Albertson's there was this new batch of balloons, which included some quite Disney-ish looking items, such as that castle and, on closer examination, Snow White herself. Being of a suspicious nature, I figured that there was a reason -- a commercial one -- for Snow White to be popping up in public around Christmas time. I promptly hied myself over to Amazon to check on the DVDs and discovered, to no surprise, that the Disney folk have just released a new edition of their pioneering feature-length cartoon. (The last time it was released was in 20-aught-2. That's a pretty good life span.)

I suppose that it's a good thing to keep DVDs of films such as Snow White and the Wizard of Oz and Shirley Temple's Little Princess in print. That way, today's kids, inundated with modern children's books and cartoons coming out the kazoo, will be familiar with a handful of the classics. It's too bad that so much new (and so much of it so bad) muscles out the old stories that provided a bridge between generations. I recall what fun I had putting together a wonderful library of children's classics for my dotter, assembled from visits to resale shops and rummage sales and 2nd hand bookstores. The only old books that I never found in these venues were the Oz books, but then I had my own collection to pass along. Of course, none of these old books would pass muster under that recent law passed by our thoughtful folk in Congress -- there might just possibly be something toxic in the ink that would poison a toddler who consumed, say, the entirety of that library I collected. Sigh.

I remember a non-bookloving friend of my mother wrinkling her nose at an old 'Children's Shakespeare' that she was pleased to have got for me from the local market, not because a bowdlerised and simplified rendition of the Bard for kiddies was a matter for disapproval, but because, she said, you couold catch something nasty from old books, and we should sterilise it by putting it in the oven.